Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970

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155 / The Britannic experiment

The outbreak of the South African War in October 1899 was

the occasion for an outburst of this Britannic sentiment. Laurier’s Lib-

eral government, resting on electoral support in both Ontario and

Quebec, tried to steer a middle course. It expressed sympathy with

the Uitlander grievances in Johannesburg. But Laurier was also deter-

mined to avoid direct involvement in the war and not to send a military

contingent.

This stance infuriated much Ontario opinion. Laurier’s

Liberal allies in the province begged him to take the lead. ‘We must

not let this patriotic feeling be headed by the Tories’, one warned

him. ‘You must head it and guide it yourself.’

Under intense pres-

sure from Ontario Liberals, Laurier caved in – to the outrage of his

most ardent supporters in Quebec. Was Canada returning to ‘l’

etat

primitif du colonie de la Couronne’, demanded his erstwhile prot

Henri Bourassa.

‘The English Canadians have two countries’, com-

plained the Montreal paper La Presse, ‘one here and one across the

sea.’

But the weight of opinion bore down inexorably on Laurier.

‘You will not, you cannot deny’, a fellow Quebecois told Bourassa,

that the will of an overwhelming majority of the Canadian

people expressed through its press, the mouthpiece of a free

people . . . not only justiﬁed but practically compelled the

action of the Executive . . . Canada cannot be indifferent to

anything which may affect the honour and prestige of the

British ﬂag.

The choice for French Canada, Laurier himself told Bourassa, was

whether to march at the head of the Confederation or to retreat

into isolation.

French Canadians had to choose between English and

American imperialism. The contingent was sent.

For Laurier’s ‘system’ and for the leadership of both main par-

ties, Liberal and Conservative, in French Canada, the rise of Britannic

sentiment was a dangerous challenge. As prosperity and immigration

increased from 1896, the simultaneous rise of the West and of ‘indus-

trial Canada’ threatened to dominate Quebec and unravel the com-

promise of 1867.

Laurier had always parried the claim that Canada

was a ‘British’ country, preferring to argue that while Canada ‘must be

British’ that meant ‘British in allegiance and Canadian in sentiment’.

Laurier’s popularity in Ontario rested partly on his reputation as an

anti-clerical in Quebec, partly on his regard for ‘provincial rights’ and

156 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

partly on the belief that he was best qualiﬁed to reconcile French Cana-

dians to a progressive ‘Britannic’ future. He was a French Canadian

‘moderniser’ whose constant professions of imperial loyalty reassured

Britannic sentiment in English Canada. That and the same laborious

attention to federal patronage that had kept Macdonald in power for

so long were enough to win a Liberal majority in the elections of 1900,

1904 and 1908. But behind these electoral successes an earthquake was

under way in Ontario. There, much Liberal opinion had been incensed

by Laurier’s apparent willingness to entrench separate catholic schools

in the two new prairie provinces set up in 1905.

Then, in 1910,the

navy question and reciprocity blew apart the alliance of Quebec and

Ontario Liberalism, and signalled the partial and uneasy triumph of

‘Britannic’ politics in Canada.

Since 1902, Laurier had tenaciously opposed the call by the

Australian and New Zealand governments for closer participation in

the making of British defence and foreign policy – fearing that any

deeper imperial commitment would revive the damaging controversy

with Bourassa in 1899.But,in1909, with the rising alarm over

German naval rivalry, Laurier found that more was required than pro-

fessions of imperial loyalty. As the ‘naval scare’ spread like a virus along

the telegraph lines and through the news agencies, the newspapers of

English Canada took up the call for a Canadian contribution to imperial

defence.

Canada should give two dreadnoughts to the Royal Navy,

declared the Manitoba Free Press, the voice of prairie Liberalism.

Laurier’s Conservative opponents took up the cry, urging immediate

help in Britain’s naval ‘emergency’. Laurier’s response was canny. His

naval service bill in January 1910 proposed a small Canadian navy,

under Canadian control. As Laurier conceded, Canada’s constitutional

status meant that, if Britain was at war, Canada would follow automat-

ically. But the extent of Canada’s contribution would be for ministers

in Ottawa to decide.

Laurier’s formula was shrewdly calculated to appease Britannic

sentiment among Liberal supporters. He also knew that Conservative

demands for direct subvention to the Royal Navy would divide their

supporters, especially in Quebec. Instead, by conceding his ‘tin pot

navy’, Laurier intended to consolidate his unwieldy coalition across

Quebec, Ontario and the West. It was a drastic miscalculation. In

Quebec, the navy bill became the hated emblem of English-Canadian

hegemony in Canada and of the growing dominance of ‘English’

157 / The Britannic experiment

capitalism in the province where urbanisation and industrialism threat-

ened to deracinate the Canadiens crowding into the anglicised cities.

To Bourassa, whose nationalism was rooted in religious and social

conservatism, and to the Quebec Conservatives with their clerical con-

nections, the enemy became ‘imperialism’; the collaborator Laurier; the

stake the survival (‘survivance’) of French Canada as a distinct, Catholic

society.

On its own, the navy question might have weakened Laurier

but not unseated him. His second miscalculation was more dangerous.

Historically, the Liberals were the party of free trade, who had opposed

the protectionism of Macdonald’s ‘national policy’. After the defeat of

reciprocity in 1891, Laurier had given up the idea of regional free trade

with the United States, adopting instead a tariff preference towards

Britain in 1897 – a shrewd sop to freer trade and Britannic feeling. But

there were powerful economic interests that still hankered after free

entry into the American market for Canada’s staple products. Above all,

there was the West. By 1910, the three prairie provinces were growing at

phenomenal speed as immigrants and capital ﬂooded in to develop the

wheat economy.

Here was a ‘new’ Canada whose support would be

decisive in the political struggle hitherto conﬁned to the three sections

of eastern Canada. The grievances of the prairie West against high

land prices, high transport costs and grain prices lower than those just

across the American border

became focused in 1910 in a campaign

against the tariff – as Laurier learnt at ﬁrst hand during a prolonged

tour of the region. When the American government offered mutual

free entry in natural products, Laurier jumped at the chance to win

over the West and the farming interests in Eastern Canada eager to

sell to or export through the United States. It might offset the Western

dislike of his naval programme.

Being conﬁned to natural products,

reciprocity posed, apparently, no threat to the industrial interests in

Eastern Canada sheltered by the national policy tariff. And, in an era

of ‘good feelings’ between Britain and the United States, the danger

of an imperialist backlash seemed slight. Opposition to reciprocity he

dismissed contemptuously as ‘froth’.

Instead, the result was indifference in Quebec where the naval

question was all

but an explosion of rage in Ontario. The sig-

nal was given by Clifford Sifton, Laurier’s sometime lieutenant in

English Canada, and the proprietor of the Manitoba Free Press. Sifton

denounced reciprocity as a threat to Canadian nationality.

He was

158 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

quickly followed by the ‘Toronto Eighteen’, the cream of Toronto’s Lib-

eral elite, the bankers, ﬁnanciers and merchants at whose head stood

Byron E. Walker and Zebulon Lash.

Their defection began a full-

scale revolt in Ontario against ofﬁcial Liberalism. Laurier’s opponents

made play with the claim that the limited reciprocity on offer would

soon be extended, under American pressure, to complete free trade. It

was a short step to argue that ‘British connection’ was in danger and

Canada’s own freedom at risk. ‘On the day British connection fails us’,

roared the Montreal Star, ‘Canadian independence is lost.’

Rejecting

reciprocity meant ‘self-reliance and allegiance to the Empire’.

Critics

at the time were quick to see the campaign against reciprocity as naked

self-interest masquerading as imperial loyalty.

Indeed, it was true that,

as Canada’s industrial zone, Ontario depended heavily on the ‘national

policy’. The Toronto plutocracy was bound to fear that freeing the West

to trade south rather than east would endanger the new rail links being

built from Toronto to the West and (consequentially) the prospects of

the Canadian Bank of Commerce of which Walker was president. But

it was also no coincidence that the Liberal defectors included those

most ardently committed to the union of Ontario and the West as the

heartland of a British Canada: Sifton, Walker and John Willison. To

weaken prematurely the ties binding the prairies to Eastern Canada

would shatter this dream. Reciprocity had been rejected in 1891 at a

time when the West was unoccupied, Willison told a Toronto audience.

Now it was ﬁlling up with Americans and a multitude of foreigners (i.e.

non-British immigrants). ‘Even the very optimistic will admit that the

national problem is very different from that which we faced even ten

years ago . . . [I]t is a mighty problem to fuse these [new people] into

a common citizenship.’

When reciprocity was defeated, Sifton told

the Ottawa Citizen: ‘the national development of Canada along British

lines will go on.’

The result was a disaster for Laurier. Instead of ﬁghting a Con-

servative party divided over the navy, he fought it with a Liberal party

divided over trade. In riding the tiger of Britannic sentiment on the

navy question, he lost Quebec. By unintentionally confronting it over

reciprocity, he lost Ontario. His place as premier was taken by Robert

Borden and his careful policy by an eager commitment to help with

Britain’s naval ‘emergency’ and claim a voice in London’s defence and

foreign policy. To Laurier, it was obvious that he had been defeated by

the insurgent force of Britannic sentiment. He told the South African

premier, Louis Botha, that the defection in Quebec had been large

159 / The Britannic experiment

‘though not abnormal’. But, in Ontario, ‘it was not a defeat, but a

landslide. In the latter Province the jingo spirit was the cause.’ He went

on: ‘You are quite right in supposing that there will be a revival of

the Jingo element.’

Botha had sympathised, as well he might: ‘I very

much fear that the result will be a revival of the jingo spirit in all parts

of the British Empire.’

Between 1890 and 1914, the most forceful and articulate cham-

pions of Canadian nationhood were those who insisted that Canada’s

future lay as a British or ‘Britannic’ country. Only as a British country,

they argued, could Canada forge a cohesive identity at home – around

a common language, institutions and history. Only as a senior partner

in the Britannic association (i.e. Empire) could Canada transcend its

colonial status and begin to take responsibility for the defence of its

national interests. This Britannic nationalism was less than the full-

blown imperialism of those who favoured imperial federation;

but

much more than support for ‘British connection’. ‘British connection’

was politically anodyne. In French Canada, loyalty to the monarch and

to British institutions as the guarantee of liberty was proverbial. Even

Henri Bourassa, the scourge of British imperialism, proclaimed his loy-

alty to ‘British connection’. But, to the Britannic nationalists, if it meant

no more than the sectional compromises invented by Macdonald and

reﬁned by Laurier, then it was a feeble substitute for a real nation-state.

Their priority was uniting the three great English-speaking sections:

‘backward’ French Canada could stumble on behind, perhaps, in due

course, to be annexed in spirit. It would, perhaps, be wrong to exag-

gerate the extent to which Canadian opinion was preoccupied with

nation-building and the imperial tie, especially in an age of such rapid

economic change. But the linked crisis over the navy question and reci-

procity showed that Britannic nationalism was the strongest political

sentiment in Canada. It was fanned by economic buoyancy and the

sense of a tightening commercial, strategic and demographic bond with

Britain. In 1911, with the Borden premiership, it seemed to hold the

initiative. Its ﬁnest hour, and its greatest trial, were yet to come.

‘Britannic’ Australia

The Australian communities, wrote Edward Shann in 1930,

festooned along a coastline of ten thousand miles are

nowadays strangely uniform in social structure. In each

160 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

port . . . you will ﬁnd a group of importers’ warehouses,

some big wool-stores, a railway terminus, a wharf-lumpers’

union and a number of public houses tied to breweries. If

there is a capital-city in the near-background, it is inhabited

largely by a civil service connected with Crown lands,

public works and education. Its environs will boast some

industries engaged on the simpler manufactures or on the

repair and maintenance of the mechanism of land transport.

Ships, if they can, seek cheaper repair elsewhere . . . Over

the range is the scene of the peculiarly Australian work

done by a scattered population of miners, farmers and

station-hands, who turn out staple raw-products on a

rough, grand scale with labour-saving machinery . . .

Brooding over the coastal capital and

browbeating . . . the mercantile and professional

classes . . . stand the federated trade unions. Their Trades

Hall is the scene of a ﬂuctuating contest between the

capable leaders of three groups: (i) the shearers, miners and

timber-workers of the bush, (ii) the town artisans, and (iii)

the transport workers and public works employees. These

contend for mastery . . . through the primaries or ‘selection-

ballots’ that name the labour candidates for the local or

national parliament . . . The farmers, with some aid from

pastoralists and the middle class, are learning political

organization from the workers, but are still clumsy and

inarticulate. This social structure varies little with the minor

staples that differences in local climate may add to the

dominant wool and wheat. The Australian communities

have set in these forms with a surprising uniformity. In the

politics of each the drive comes mainly from a hard-eyed,

hard-headed, hard-mouthed working democracy.

Shann was describing (in prose reminiscent of Joseph Conrad)

a society that had crystallised in the 1890s when Australia entered her

imperial age. In the 1850s, the Australian colonies had been trans-

formed economically by the gold rush, politically by self-government

and socially by the end of convict transportation (the exception to

all three was Western Australia). In the thirty years after 1860,they

had expanded (at 5 per cent a year) in an atmosphere of boom.

The

161 / The Britannic experiment

population rose from one to three million, some 40 per cent of the

increase by immigration. The number of sheep rocketed from 40 mil-

lion in 1870 to 106 million twenty years later.

Wheat farming sprang

up in South Australia. Pastoralism and mining developed in the vast

spaces of Queensland.

Huge deposits of silver, lead and zinc were

found at Broken Hill in New South Wales.

An infant manufactur-

ing economy emerged behind Victoria’s tariffs, and Melbourne (as the

local metropolis of gold) became the ﬁnancial capital of the Australian

colonies.

British investment rushed in. Railway mileage tripled in the

decade after 1870 to 4,000 miles and reached 10,000 miles in 1892.

With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the arrival of the

submarine cable in 1872, Australia’s long isolation seemed less for-

bidding. But Europe was still thirty days’ steaming away,

and up

to the 1890s most Australian trade was carried slowly but cheaply in

sailing ships.

In fact, between 1860 and 1890, distance and democracy had

combined to fashion a highly distinctive pattern of Australian develop-

ment. Rapid commercial expansion might have been expected to favour

the local concentration of wealth and power. But Australia’s remote-

ness from Europe and its huge internal distances worked in the opposite

direction. Trade and capital were not funnelled through a single gate-

way as happened in Canada but entered by a string of ports each with

its own agricultural, pastoral and mineral hinterland and its own sys-

tem of roads and railways. The high cost of transit from Europe cut

immigration to a relative trickle (compared with the North American

ﬂood)

and the high risk of railway construction in Australia’s empty

interior deterred the private capital that came forward in the Americas.

As a result, the political economy of development fell largely under

state control. The colonial governments alone had the revenue (from

land sales) to meet its demands and bear its risks. Half of Australian

borrowing abroad (that is, on London) was by public authorities rather

than private enterprise.

That might have meant less had colonial min-

istries been the servants of a mercantile elite. But, since the 1850s, all

the eastern colonies save Tasmania had had manhood suffrage. There

was little enthusiasm in these colonial democracies for the subsidy of

new migrants whose arrival would drive down wages. Separate colonial

electorates created a vested interest in separate colonial development,

so that Australia’s economy like its railways remained fragmented. The

political inﬂuence concentrated in each colonial capital helped to ensure

162 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

that public spending ﬂowed disproportionately to boost its rail connec-

tions and port facilities, tightening its grip on a ‘private’ hinterland

behind and discouraging inter-regional connections.

Colonial poli-

tics revolved, predictably, not around issues of class, status or religion,

but around more homely quarrels over ‘log-rolling’ – using political

inﬂuence to roll public money towards particular persons, interests or

localities. Factions not parties dominated the colonial parliaments – a

pattern only partly mitigated by disputes between the ‘squatter’ inter-

est with its vast sheep runs and aristocratic pretensions and those who

favoured close settlement and small farms.

Australian experience between 1860 and 1890 seemed to show

that colonial autonomy could be successfully practised despite polit-

ical fragmentation, heavy dependence on a narrow range of staple

exports and a small population recruited almost exclusively from British

migrants. Australia remained a geographical expression, although a

sense of common origins, cultural and occupational similarities and

a high degree of labour mobility between colonies encouraged liter-

ary depiction of a distinctive Australian ‘type’ or identity common

to all. Australian unity remained a vague aspiration. Inter-colonial

cooperation was chieﬂy visible in the common antipathy to Chinese

immigration – the occasion of joint inter-colonial declarations in 1881

and 1887 – and in a gradually rising alarm at the arrival of German

colonialism in the South Paciﬁc in the same decade.

The 1890s brought a dramatic change. The rapid growth of

previous decades was violently checked. Having borrowed easily from

London in the 1880s when City lenders were awash with money, Aus-

tralian governments, banks and businesses found their credit running

dry. Borrowing had outstripped (for the moment) the capacity to gen-

erate new income to service the debt. The Barings crisis in Argentina,

where export growth had failed to match the rising cost of foreign loans,

helped shatter conﬁdence in Australia’s prospects.

British investors

turned away. Australian banks watched their London deposits dwin-

dle, enforcing a drastic monetary contraction in the colonies. Banks

and businesses failed. Unemployment soared, throwing (the ﬁgures are

imprecise) perhaps one-third of skilled workers into the street.

With

no system of welfare as a safeguard, the ‘workingman’s paradise’ in

Australia had become a gloomy dystopia of depression.

Partly for this reason, the 1890s were the critical phase in the

making of Australian political consciousness. A tradition of labour

163 / The Britannic experiment

militancy, laced with imported socialism and republicanism, had grown

up in the booming eighties, most vigorously on Queensland’s raw fron-

tier of mining and pastoralism.

Boom conditions sharpened the con-

trast between those with access to imported capital and the means to

corner the supply of natural resources and those who depended on

their labour.

With the ﬁerce contraction of trade, labour discontent

turned to bitterness and desperation. Wage cuts and lay-offs provoked

large-scale strikes among shearers, seamen and miners across much of

Eastern Australia in the early 1890s.

But direct action made little

headway against hostile governments and employers who could draw

on the great pool of unemployed. The real legacy of the depression

was the emergence of labor parties to speak for organised labour in

the colonial parliaments. In New South Wales, Labor won 35 seats

out of 141 at the election of 1891.

Elsewhere, the rise of labour as

a political force produced a series of concessions to populist demands:

reducing the parliamentary term to three years (in Queensland and

Western Australia); abolishing the property qualiﬁcation for members

(Western Australia and Tasmania); manhood suffrage where it had not

already been conceded; new factory legislation; new taxes on land and

income; the extension of wage boards and arbitration courts to set

pay and resolve disputes.

Under the blast of economic hardship, the

instinct of Australian communities was to protect, as far as they could,

the living standards of more prosperous times and the egalitarian ethos

inherited from the 1850s.

This defensive mood was aggravated by deepening racial anxi-

ety. The fear of cheap ‘Asiatic’ labour willing to work for low wages was

common to white settler societies all round the Paciﬁc and even beyond.

Economic rivalry, cultural difference and settler democracy were a

lethal combination. The resentment of white workers was inﬂamed by

the suspicion that Chinese immigrants, indifferent to Christian ethics,

would be a source of moral, social and political corruption; worse still,

that they would be pliant tools of big employers. Social cohesion and

the enforcement of respectability, fragile growths in migrant societies,

seemed to demand the ruthless suppression of visible distinction and a

rigid adherence to ‘common’ ideals – a tendency that Tocqueville had

noticed in the United States in the 1830s. The racism of white labour

was ﬁercest in Queensland where a tropical climate, a plantation sys-

tem and the arrival of Polynesian as well as Chinese labour threat-

ened to split the colony between a ‘white’ south and a ‘black’ north.

164 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

Depression exacerbated this race antagonism. Australia’s Chinese pop-

ulation was tiny: perhaps 2 per cent of the adult male population in

1891.

Chinese labour was largely excluded from agriculture, pastoral-

ism and mining. But, in a number of trades, it made up 20 per cent or

more of the workforce.

As unemployment rose, these Chinese made

an easy scapegoat for economic failure. The rights of labour mutated

swiftly into the racial privilege of white workers and the demand that,

at whatever cost, Australia should be reserved for the white man.

In fact, Chinese entry had been closely restricted since the

1880s. But, in the 1890s, depression-induced nightmares of a vast

reserve army of Asian labour poised to rush the Australian barricade

fused with the geopolitical unease set off by the French and German

colonial presence in the South Paciﬁc. This intrusion was resented in

part as frustrating the ambitions of Australian ‘sub-imperialists’.

But

its underlying threat was much more serious. If the South Paciﬁc became

the scene of colonial and naval rivalry (or the horse-trading of impe-

rial powers), the Australian colonies, so precariously dependent on

sea transport for their local communications and long-distance trade,

would be dangerously exposed to disruption if not invasion. Their cap-

ital cities, into which one-third of the population was now crowded,

had no defence against naval attack.

In the mid-1890s, as great power

competition in China accelerated, a new factor catalysed Australian

anxiety. Japan’s victory over China in 1895, its annexation of Taiwan,

and the rise of Japanese migration in the Paciﬁc region signalled the

emergence of an Asian great power and brought home the true extent

of Australian vulnerability in the new ﬂuid era of world politics.

Depression and its populist aftermath, racial panic and strate-

gic alarm, thus formed the context in which the great project for an

Australian federation was carried through in the 1890s. Together, they

exerted a crucial inﬂuence on the ‘founding fathers’ and their design.

The originator of the federal project was Sir Henry Parkes, the grand

old man of New South Wales politics. Parkes was a long-standing advo-

cate of federation. He regarded the non-executive ‘federal council’ set

up in 1881 to encourage inter-colonial co-operation as a dead-end. In

1889, he invited the premiers of Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and

South Australia and New Zealand to a convention to plan a federal

parliament of two houses and a federal executive.

Parkes evoked an

Australia of ‘one people, one destiny’. He was eager for federation to

promote Australian defence, control the entry of ‘aliens’, harmonise the